ORIE Colloquium: Amitabh Basu (UC Davis) - Mixed Integer Optimization : A Solution Methodology Friday, February 8, 2013 at 2:30pm Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall, 253 Mixed Integer Programming has emerged as an indispensable tool for the Operations Research community. In spite of its enormous success as a key solution technique for numerous application domains, there are areas which require significant improvements in this technology, like facility location and combinatorial auctions to name a few. I will present my work on techniques that make progress towards achieving the next methodological breakthrough in solving general mixed integer programming models. The talk will focus on my work in cutting plane theory for solving such problems. I will present a framework which unifies previous methods in cutting planes and provides new, and potentially much stronger, cutting plane ideas. This line of work combines the insights behind Gomory's Corner Polyhedron and Balas' Intersection Cuts, using tools from convex analysis, polyhedral geometry and the geometry of numbers. This has initiated intense research activity in the integer programming community in the past five years. The ultimate hope is to achieve the next leap in solving large scale optimization problems in practice. Bio: Amitabh Basu obtained his undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2004, and received an M.S. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2006. In May 2010, he finished a PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization from the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University advised by Gerard Cornuejols. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at University of California, Davis. Amitabh's research interests lie in optimization, with current emphasis on discrete optimization. His thesis and current research work has led to more than a dozen published papers in journals like Mathematical Programming, Mathematics of Operations Research, SIAM Journal in Discrete Mathematics, INFORMS Journal on Computing. He was also one of the three finalists for the triennial Tucker Prize awarded for the best dissertation on optimization by the Mathematical Optimization Society.